SHARE:

Gavin Kaysen returns to his motherland to open a new restaurant.

January 14, 2015

Chef Gavin Kaysen rocked the food world last March when he announced that he was leaving his post as the executive chef at the revered Café Boulud, in New York, and moving to Minneapolis, where he grew up, to open a restaurant, Spoon and Stable. He didn’t think this was so shocking. “The Minneapolis food scene is at a level that more people should be paying attention to,” Kaysen says.

In November he debuted his restaurant. The menu has five sections: garden, chilled, grains and pasta, sea and land. But we recommend ordering Dorothy’s Dinner, named after Kaysen’s grandmother, which features daily-rotating dishes served family-style. The main course might be pot roast, fried chicken or veal; dessert could be blueberry pie or a sundae. “The point is for you to make my table your table, just like my grandmother used to do,” Kaysen says. At the end of the meal, the chef sends diners home with a gift like cookies or a muffin—just like Dorothy would give him and his cousins when they left her house.